By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Malcolm Ross, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, AustralianNational University

This book is a collection of fourteen papers on thediachronic syntax of mostly European languages, with anintroductory contribution by the editors. Except whereindicated below, the contributions are in a Principles andParameters/Minimalist framework.

It seems to me that there are two different but overlappingenterprises that lay claim to the term 'diachronic syntax'.The practitioners of one operate in the P&amp;P/Minimalistframework, the practitioners of the other in the moreconservative framework outlined, for example, by Harris andCampbell (1995). More of this below. Most of thecontributors to this book pursue the first of theseenterprises, whilst I pursue the second. I mention thissimply to indicate that my emphases may be somewhatdifferent from those of a reviewer working in the firstframework.

This chapter is far more than a standard introduction: it isa good overview of the issues currently facing historicalsyntacticians working in the framework of the MinimalistProgram.

The editors begin by pointing out that the standard positionwithin diachronic Chomskyan syntax, emphasising the role ofacquisition in change, needs to be complemented by the studyof diffusion. This study has taken off in recent yearsbecause electronic text corpora allow statistically foundedsyntactic analysis and the interpretation of syntacticchanges in 'E(xternalised) language' as evidence of changesin 'I(nternalised) language'. The present book contains anumber of such studies (all except Vincent, Briscoe,Martins, Whitman and Batllori &amp; Roca). Although diffusionconsists in part of the successive acquisition by childrenof a change that has already arisen, this is not the wholestory. The trick, as it were, is to find explanations forvariation and diffusion which fall out from generalsyntactic theory and do not require appeal to 'historicaltendencies'.

The editors outline the relationships between diachronicsyntax and (i) P&amp;P and (ii) the Minimalist Program. In theP&amp;P framework, the acquisition task includes determining thelanguage's settings of a small number of parameters withinUniversal Grammar (UG), and syntactic change consists inlearners analysing the input data differently from theirforebears, thereby resetting parameters for the acquiredlanguage. In the Minimalist Program, however, the locus ofsyntactic change is confined to 'operation O', which formslexical items out of phonological, semantic and syntacticfeatures: 'change can be described simply as thereorganization of the featural content of the lexical itemsof the language' (p7). Loss or gain of movement occurs whenlearners revise the featural content of functional lexicalitems, and grammaticalisation can be understood as arevision that results in structural simplification (cfWhitman below).

Lightfoot (1979) showed that a cluster of related changes inE-data may reflect a single change in parameter setting inI-language, but the editors point out that other inferencesfrom such E-data are possible. One change may simply removethe environment for some other feature (cf Williams below).There is considerable support for Kroch's (1989a, 1984b,1994) 'Constant Rate Effect', the insight that, although ata given time an ongoing change may be at different stages indifferent grammatical contexts, its rate of change in thesecontexts will be the same (exemplified by Hr�arsd�ttir'scontribution to this book).

Returning to the issue of diffusion, the editors point totwo basic explanations of variation. One is that speakersswitch between two competing grammars, as proposed by Kroch(1989a, 1994) Santorini (1992) and Taylor (1994) (see alsoBatllori &amp; Roca and Han below). The other is that thegrammar includes variants that are equally costly, assuggested by van der Wurff (1997) (see also Delsing below).These two possibilities may interact with sociolinguistic orprocessing pressures or, as Briscoe suggests in this volume,with the inductive bias of the learner towards one parametersetting rather than another. The editors' discussion heredraws our attention to the complexity of the issues raisedby diffusion, and ends with a brief look at the treatment ofgrammaticalisation within the Minimalist Program.

The remainder of the introduction summarises thecontributions to the volume and notes their relevance to theissues above.

This outstandingly erudite chapter is an essay on method.The case study around which it is built has to do withchanges in the licensing of null and overt pronominalarguments as Latin developed into the Romance languages --but the data are well enough known: Vincent's objective isto argue for the concepts of Competition (drawn fromOptimality Theory [OT]) and Correspondence (in itsLexical-Functional Grammar [LFG] sense) and thus for anOT/LFG-based approach to change in linguistic systems.

'Competition' captures the intuition that at any given timea language consists of (at least potentially) competingforms and subsystems which are the bases of change,including grammaticalisation paths. By modelling changes insubsystems as OT-style changes in constraint rankings,Vincent argues that it is possible to capture thesephenomena in a precise manner -- a goal that has otherwiselargely evaded practitioners of formal approaches.

'Correspondence' in LFG refers to the relationship betweenthe representation of abstract grammatical relations andtheir expression in linguistic form, whether syntactic ormorphological. Where the same universal set of features forpronominal content is expressed in different ways over time- as zero, as dependent forms with varying degrees ofboundness and varying positions, or as independent forms --an LFG-type approach allows a cleaner account than aconfigurationally based system like P&amp;P.

Van Kemenade sets out to show that grammaticalisation is amorphosyntactic process rather than a semantic one. Hermaterial is drawn from negation in English, which has seen acyclic process whereby a negative morpheme has undergonemorphosyntactic weakening, associated with the rise of a newnegator which subsequently also undergoes weakening. In herP&amp;P framework, each negator begins life as a specifier, thenbecomes a functional head, and finally an inflection.Crucial to her argument is the obervation that Old English(OE) main-clause-initial _ne_ usually blockedtopicalisation, indicating that it occupied the topic(specifier of CP) position itself. At the same time, it wascliticised to an immediately following verb. That is, itwas phonologically weakened, but still a constituent with nochange in semantic content, implying that the weakeningprocess precedes semantic change and is not driven by it.Van Kemenade mentions, for example, the modern Englishmorphosyntactic difference between 'Didn't they warn you?'and 'Did they not warn you?', handed down from OE, wherethere is no semantic contrast.

Van Kemenade (p50) attributes to grammaticalisationtheorists, and to Hopper and Traugott (1993) in particular,the claim that grammaticalisation is semantically driven.It lies beyond the scope of this review to discuss thisissue, but a reading of pp66-67 of Hopper and Traugottsuggests that this is not quite the position of its authorsand that they would not necessarily be at odds with vanKemenade's conclusion.

**Ted Briscoe, 'Evolutionary perspectives on diachronicsyntax'

Briscoe's subject matter is the way in which changes spreadthrough a speech community. He first models languageacquisition and the situation of the learner who receivesinput from two conflicting grammars that are present in thecommunity as the result of ongoing change, then he modelsthe spread of a change through the community. He arguesthat (E-)languages are complex adaptive systems which'evolve', in the technical sense of the word: there israndom variation and selection from among variants, leadingto differing inheritances. This selection, however, isbiassed in the direction of innate UG.

Drawing on his own recent work, he takes the case ofHawaiian Creole and shows that on the model he proposesthere is nothing fundamentally exceptional about itsdevelopment, as long as one accepts UG-based bias.Importantly, this places glottogenesis within a coherenttheory of language change.

Every other contribution to the book focusses on changes inthe grammars of individual languages, and most deal with aset of changes in a single language or a small set ofclosely related languages. Although some of them touch onthe concept of competing grammars (see the Introduction),Briscoe's contribution is radically complementary to them,because he tackles the _mechanism_ of diffusion of changethrough a population. This issue has been addressed in theliterature before, in Keller's (1990) application of the'invisible hand' to language change and in linguistic usesof social network theory (Le Page and Andr�e Tabouret-Keller1985, Milroy and Milroy 1985, Milroy 1987, Ross 1997), butBriscoe is innovatory both in offering a formal theory ofdiffusion and in integrating it with a theory of languageacquisition.

This chapter is very different from the others not only inits subject matter, but also in its approach. There are nolinguistic data. Instead, Briscoe builds a formaltheoretical model, using a Categorial Grammar formalism todepict language change and a Bayesian statistical approachto learning and diffusion. This is daunting for the readerwhose staple fare is typified by the rest of the book, butthe issues Briscoe deals with are crucial to historicallinguistics, and I am glad that writing this review made megrapple with their presentation.

****Part 2: 'The comparative basis of diachronic syntax'

These chapters are based on corpus analysis and offerexplanations of syntactic phenomena. Given theconfigurational basis of P&amp;P, this means determining whatpositions are occupied by what constituents of the ratherchallenging structures of Old and Middle English.

**Eric Haeberli's 'Adjuncts and the syntax of subjects inOld and Middle English'

Haeberli focuses on the adjacency or otherwise of the verband subject in V2 clauses in Germanic languges. Some ofthese languages allow an adjunct to intervene between finiteverb and (non-pronominal) subject, whilst others don't.Haeberli provisionally labels the two maximal projectionsbelow CP as XP and YP. The fronted constituent of a normalV2 clause is at Spec CP, the verb at C. In a V2 clause witha pronominal subject (e.g. Wahrscheinlich [V wird] [SU er][A sp�ter] dieselbe Uhr kaufen), the subject (SU) is at SpecXP, the adjunct (A) at X, and in a clause with anon-pronominal subject (e.g. Wahrscheinlich [V wird] [Asp�ter] [SU Hans] dieselbe Uhr kaufen) the subject is atSpec YP. Haeberli asks, What are XP and YP? Old English (OE)data are crucial to his answer. Like other V2 Germaniclanguages, OE has verb movement to C, but in just OE theverb instead moved under certain conditions only to X,sometimes indicated by a preceding pronoun subject at SpecXP. Thus the adjunct in normal Germanic V2 clauses and theverb in the special OE clauses occupy the same position, X.Haeberli then compares southern and northern Early MiddleEnglish (EME). The southern dialects had the same verbmovement possibilities as OE, but the northern dialect hadonly movement to C, as in modern V2 Germanic, and no adjunctintervening between verb and subject. The subject agreementsystem of verbal suffixes was impoverished in the northerndialect, and Haeberli sees this as evidence that the AgrSPof Old and southern Middle English (ME) had vanished,leaving only one position for the northern verb. That is,Old English XP was AgrSP and, by inference, YP was TP. InNorthern Middle English the next projection below CP was TP:there was no AgrSP, only one postverbal subject position,and no intervening adjunct.

Haeberli's account is ingenious, but leaves me with twoquestions. First, a German non-pronominal subject can occurin either of the two positions mentioned above (i.e. theadjunct can occur before or after the subject). Thisanalysis requires me to believe that there is a fundamentaldifference in constituent structure between these twoversions of the clause: this feels like a heavy analyticprice to pay for a small surface difference. Second, if theimpossibility of an intervening adjunct is diagnostic ofloss of AgrSP, its impossibility in Icelandic, whereverb--subject agreement remains, is unexplained.

**Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor, 'Verb--Object order in EarlyMiddle English'

Kroch and Taylor report on an extensive quantitativeanalysis of consitituent order in West Midland and SoutheastEME manuscripts. Their goal is to determine the underlyingorder(s) in these data after the effects of movements likeleftward scrambling and rightward extraposition have beentaken into account. They work towards this goal using acombination of statistical analysis and syntacticdiagnostics and show first that EME texts have a smallremnant of INFL-final word order (in non-P&amp;P terms, thefinite auxiliary is final), even when stylistic fronting iseliminated from the data set. They show that underlying OVword order (where V is the finite or non-finite verb, notthe auxiliary) is hard to establish, as leftward scramblingof the object in a VO clause mimics OV order. However, theyconclude that there is a difference in the scramblingbehaviour of quantified and non-quantified objects:quantified objects scramble regularly, non-quantified don't.Their data show that 30% of non-quantified objects arepreverbal, and they infer that these represent OV order.Finally, Kroch and Taylor show that leftward scrambling ofpronouns outlasted OV word order and that a preverbalpronoun object is not diagnostic of OV order.

The importance of Kroch and Taylor's contribution is that itsupports the notion that syntactic change is not sudden butoccurs via competition. There is continuity between Late OEand EME syntax, with the more conservative Southeastern andless conservative West Midlands texts differing in theirrates of change

**Alexander Williams, 'Null subjects in Middle Englishextistentials'

Williams argues on the basis of distribution that the typesof existential sentence from which expletive 'there' ismissing can be divided into sentence types which lack'there' altogether and sentence types where it follows theverb but is unpronounced. Sentences where 'there' isunpronounced are relatively common until 1250, but drop offrapidly after that date. Williams associates this with thefact that verb-initial sentences drop off markedly at thesame time. Since the environment of unpronounced 'there' ispost-verbal, he argues that it disappears simply because itsenvironment has disappeared.

****Part 3: 'Mechanisms of syntactic change'

***Section 1: 'Features and categories'

Both the papers in this section address problems which arenot readily solved by movement analyses. Instead, theyposit changes in features (sub-categorial in Martins' case,categorial in Whitman's) at terminal nodes.

If coocurrence of the negator with a preverbal negativeindefinite is labelled as (1) and postverbal non-negativeuse as (2), then in the earliest stages of Old Romance, (1)was obligatory, and (2) was acceptable. The histories ofthe Romance languages were largely independent of eachother, but drift was in the same direction, and no modernlanguage retains the earliest Old Romance situation. InModern Romanian and Venetian, (1) remains obligatory, but(2) is unacceptable. In later Old Romance and modernCatalan, (1) is optional, (2) acceptable. In Galician,Spanish, Italian and French (1) is unacceptable and (2)acceptable. And in Portuguese, the most innovative languagein this regard, (1) and (2) are both unacceptable. Martinsargues with regard to (2) that negative and positiveindefinites are in competition and that the non-negative useof negatives loses out to the more explicit positives.

Within the Minimalist framework, Martins proposes to dealwith these changes by changes in features whose attributesare affirmative, negative and modal, their values '+', '0'(un[der]specified) and 'alpha'. For example, the negativeindefinites of Portuguese are always 0 aff, + neg, 0 mod (asthey are always negative in their own right), whereas thoseof earliest Old Romance are always 0 aff, alpha neg, alphamod, as their negative reading is always dependent on thepresence of a negator and modal use determines their readingin that context.

**John Whitman, 'Relabelling'

In the only paper in the volume to tackle a theoreticalissue in diachronic syntax from a perspective embracingunrelated languages, John Whitman argues that reanalysisdoes not entail syntactic restructuring but 'relabelling'.His point is that in a P&amp;P approach, reanalysis entailschanges in deep but not surface structure. In theMinimalist approach, there is no deep structure, and so thispossibility is unavailable. Instead, he argues, reanalysisis relabelling, i.e. change in the categorial feature of ahead, but not in syntactic structure outside the minimaldomain of the relabelled item (cf the Introduction to thevolume).

Whitman examines cases from a variety of languages. Hebegins with two cases from Ewe, verb-to-preposition andverb-to-complementiser, then moves on to a potentialcounterexample, the putative [for + NP][to + verb] to [for[NP + to + verb]] reanalysis in English. He shows that thisis a straw man -- it represents a misinterpretation of thediachronic data. His interpretation of verb-to-prepositionreanalysis in serial verb constructions requires that onlythe second, and never the first, verb may become apreposition. Again, he deals with counterexamples (the mostimportant being the object-marking 'preposition' _ba_ inMandarin) suggesting in each case that the synchronicanalysis which posits a preposition is wrong. Finally, hedefines two kinds of structural changes that do occur withinthe minimal domain of the head, illustrating them withMandarin and Saramaccan cases. The first is 'pruning',which, for example, gets rid of the node from which Spec VP(the subject of the verb) branches when the verb becomes apreposition. The other is its converse, specifier-to-headreanalysis.

This is an important paper because it tackles an issue whichis central to accounts of grammaticalisation. What doeshappen in the grammar when a verb becomes a preposition? Inany framework which is constituency-based and which positsstructural change to explain reanalysis, there is thedifficult issue of how this change takes place, especiallywhen ungrammaticalised and grammaticalised stages co-exist.Whitman's hypothesis reduces this difficulty.

***Section 3: 'Movement'

Of the five chapters in this section, the first is concernedwith movement within the NP, the others with movement ofverbal constituents within the clause.

**Montse Batllori and Francesc Roca, 'The value of definitedeterminers from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish'

The subject of this paper is differences in the behaviour of_el_, _la_, _los_ and _las_ in Old and Modern Spanish. InOld Spanish, these forms remained syntacticallydemonstrative, like the members of the Latin paradigm of_ille_ from which they were descended. Thus in Old Spanish,_el_ etc do not cooccur in a NP with a demonstrative, do notoccur in a generic NP, and are attested pronominally. Noneof these statements is true of the modern language.

Batllori and Roca characterise this change as the 'loss ofderivational steps involving movement'. They posit a DemPas complement of D. In Old Spanish _el_ etc are analysed asDem having moved to D. In Modern Spanish they are analysedas generated at D.

An interesting feature of this chapter is that the OldSpanish texts used by the authors manifest two grammars withregard to the behaviour of _el_ etc: the one brieflydescribed for Old Spanish and the one described for ModernSpanish. The authors describe this as being akin tocode-switching, i.e. switching between two competinggrammars (see the Introduction).

**Lars-Olof Delsing, 'From OV to VO in Swedish'

Delsing examines Swedish texts from about 1270 to around1580. He finds that OV order remained prevalent in the veryearliest of these but was followed quite early in thefourteenth century by a split into what he calls Types I andII clauses. Type I clauses were almost only VO, Type IIwere OV or VO. Type II includes a bare noun with a 'light'verb (e.g. loff vita 'give praise') and personal,demonstrative, possessive and indefinite pronouns. Theproportion of Type II OV clauses drops during the rest ofthe fourteenth century, increases again during thefifteenth, then drops off during the sixteenth, landing at9% in Delsing's last text (Brahe, ca 1580). Since themid-seventeenth century, Swedish has been a VO language.

Delsing argues that Type I objects have a filled D-position,whereas Type II objects don't. The bare noun with a lightverb is clearly an NP rather than a DP, and Delsing citesarguments from earlier papers to the effect that thepronouns are generated in functional projections belowD-position. He suggests that Type II OV/VO variation is dueto a choice between two equally costly derivations. In theVO case the head noun or pronoun moves to D, thus fillingthe D-position. In the OV case, the whole phrase is movedto Spec,AgrOP. The temporary increase in OV during thefifteenth century is the result of heavy Low Germaninfluence on Swedish and is a performance phenomenon, not achange in grammar. Delsing speculates that the final shiftto pure VO is correlated with the loss of V-to-I movement.

This chapter is comparable with the previous one, in that itseeks to explain two simultaneous grammatical behaviours,but Delsing opts for an 'equal-cost' explanation rather thanfor the 'competing grammars' hypothesis (see theIntroduction for discussion). His suggestion of Low Germaninfluence implies, however, that at that stage there mustalso have been competing grammars.

The lack of trees or labelled bracketings make this chapterrather hard to follow: this is exacerbated by the fact thatthe writer makes more specific theoretical presuppositionsthan most of the book's other contributors.

Han asks why _do_-support developed in a major way innegative imperatives only after 1600, whereas it hasdeveloped earlier in its other contexts. Her answer dependson two arguments. One is that negation occurred (andoccurs) at two different points in the phrase structuretree, one above MoodP, the other below it (e.g. 'He didn'tnot eat his greens'). The other is that the phrasestructure should recognise both a MoodP and an AspP. Thisallows Han to divide V-to-I movement into two: V-to-Asp andMood-to-Tense. Loss of (the higher) Mood-to-Tense movementoccurred first, affecting interrogatives and negativedeclaratives, but not negative imperatives, which do notproject a TenseP. Hence _do_-support developed ininterrogatives and negative declaratives but not in negativeimperatives. Then loss of V-to-Asp movement occurred earlyin the seventeenth century. This did affect negativeimperatives, resulting in the development of _do_-support inthem too.

This paper is not only clearly written, but it presents aninteresting challenge to people working in other frameworks.Han shows that a particular change (the development of_do_-support) occurred in different structural contexts atdifferent times, and offers an answer to the question 'why?'which is based on differences between these contexts. Heranswer is strongly framework-dependent, as it appeals toMinimalist-style phrase structure.

Like Batllori and Roca, Han appeals to Kroch's model ofchange as representing competition between grammars.Indeed, she suggests that at the end of the sixteenthcentury, three grammars were in competition: a grammar withboth Mood-to-Tense and V-to-Asp movement, one withoutMood-to-Tense but with V-to-Asp movement, and a third withneither.

The paper investigates the diachronic shift from verb-finalto verb-medial order in Icelandic. Although the authortalks about OV and VO order, she makes it clear that theshift entailed not only objects, but other complements ofthe verb--prepositional phrases, adverbs and adjectives,verbal particles (i.e. the 'separable particles' of Germantraditional grammar) and, where V is an auxiliary,non-finite main verbs. She needs to explain why thepre-verbal frequency of all these complement types declinedat the same rate over time. Her explanation of this changeis perforce quite different from Delsing's for Norwegian(see above), since she tackles the shift in relation to allcomplement types as a unitary phenomenon.

Hr�arsd�ttir accepts the Minimalist assumption thatunderlying order is universally VO. Where there is a finiteauxiliary and a non-finite main verb, this results in theorder Aux Main Obj. She proposes three main transformationsthat operate on this order. First, in Older Icelandic, theembedded VP was optionally extracted from the matrix VP andfronted to Spec,PredP, giving the order Main Obj Aux.Secondly, at all stages of Icelandic, the direct objectmoved leftward to Spec,AgrOP, giving OV order. In OlderIcelandic this results in Obj Main Aux, in Modern Icelandicin Obj Aux Main. And finally, the remnant VP containing the(finite) auxiliary was preposed, giving the order Aux ObjMain (= OV) in Older Icelandic and Aux Main Obj (= VO) inModern Icelandic. The difference between Older and ModernIcelandic, then, is that the first transformation, PredPfronting, has ceased to apply in Modern Icelandic. Thechange in constituent order over time receives a unifiedexplanation in the gradual loss of PredP fronting.

**David Willis, 'Verb movement in Slavonic conditionals'

The topic of this paper is the grammaticalisation of theRussian conditional marker _by_, which was originally aconditional form of the auxiliary 'be'.

Willis examines conditional usage in Old Church Slavonic andOld Russian texts, where the conditional was formed from theconditional of auxiliary 'be' and the active (_-l_participle). Using the negator and clitic pronouns, heestablishes the movements which the auxiliary and theparticiple undergo, and shows that the auxiliary moved fromT to to be right-adjoined to C. However, the environment forthis movement was wider in Old Russian than in Old ChurchSlavonic. Crucially, the second/third person singular formof the auxiliary was uninflected _by_ in Old Russian andalways underwent movement to C. As a result, Willishypothesises, _by_ came to be base-generated by learners asa conditional marker at C (rather than as an auxiliary at Tundergoing movement to C) by the early fourteenth century.This left a sentence with no finite verb, a configurationwhich would have been rejected during acquisition, but forthe fact that in Old Russian the third person singularperfect auxiliary was normally null, i.e. a sentence-typewithout a finite verb already occurred. Willis takes usthrough the steps which led, in the fifteenth century, tothe complete loss of the conditional auxiliary and thegeneralisation of _by_ as conditional marker.

This story is theoretically interesting, as Willis pointsout. Not only is it an example of reanalysis andgrammaticalisation, but, more specifically, it is a casewhere movement is eliminated by reanalysing the derivedposition as basic (unlike other well studied cases ofmovement elimination, where movement has simply stoppedoccurring).

This chapter is one of the best written in the volume: theaccount is lucid in that each step is carefully spelled outand supported by clear tree diagrams.

******COMMENT

Some comments on individual contributions are included inthe description above.

The title of this book suggests a wide sweep of subjectmatter, but this expectation is disappointed in tworespects. First, almost all the papers are in one or otherversion of a single framework, P&amp;P/Minimalism (theexceptions are Vincent [OT/LFG] and Briscoe, whose focus ison community-based patterns of change). Second, the rangeof languages from which data are drawn is very narrow. OnlyWhitman's contribution takes us outside Europe, and of theremaining twelve chapters seven are on Germanic, three onRomance, one on Slavonic and one (Briscoe's) has no languagedata. The second limitation follows in some measure fromthe first, as it is a necessary condition of the P&amp;Papproach that diachronic analysis is a comparison of a setof synchronic states (as the editors [p16] and van Kemenade[p53] both point out), and synchronic states from the pastmust of necessity be based on the analysis of text corpora.Hopefully, diachronic text corpora covering a wider range oflanguages will gradually become available, although for mostlanguages and many language families this will never bepossible. Pre-modern texts are available, for example, forvery few languages of the Austronesian language family.Diachronic syntax here entails syntactic reconstruction,which falls outside the boundaries of diachronic syntax ascurrently practised in the P&amp;P framework.

Setting aside the expectations of the previous paragraph,there is much of interest in this book. The stronglytext-oriented approach of most of the contributorsguarantees an empirical basis and challenges practitionersof other frameworks to offer their own accounts of thechanges described in the book. The editors' contributionprovides a good introduction to issues facing diachronicsyntacticians in the P&amp;P/Minimalist framework, and, broadlyspeaking, these are not different from those facinghistorical linguists working in other frameworks. Theyinclude the interpretation and evaluation of writtensources, the mechanisms of change from both individual andcommunity perspectives (especially the interpretation ofvariation), and the place of grammaticalisation within awider theory of morphosyntactic change.

Defining the domain of grammaticalisation within theMinimalist Program is a topic that surfaces at variouspoints in the book. The editors point to Roberts andRoussou (1999) as a significant contribution to its study.Willis provides a well documented example ofgrammaticalisation as defined by Roberts and Roussou: alexical head which moves is reanalysed as an in situfunctional head. Whitman adds another dimension ofgrammaticalisation, discussing cases where there is no majorsyntactic restructuring but a change in the categorialfeature of the head. Van Kemenade deals with the reanalysisof a functional specifier as a functional head, but her mainconcern is to show that grammaticalisation ismorphosyntactically (not semantically) driven (Willis'chapter supports her in this). Vincent suggests that aderivational framework is not the best way to tackle theanalysis of grammaticalisation.

There are some significant differences between theenterprise pursued by the authors in this book and thatpursued by, e.g., Harris and Campbell (1995). The latterare pursuing diachronic morphosyntax, i.e. they study whathappens to particular forms over time in a given structuralcontext. The writers in this book pursue 'the newcomparative syntax', without necessarily attending to form.An example of this occurs in Martins' contribution (p211),where we find French _Marie n'a achet� aucun livre_ 'Marydidn't buy a book'. Here _aucun_ is the negativeindefinite, but it is cognate with the Spanish positiveindefinite _alg�n_ (and its cognates in other languages).That is, the Old Romance positive indefinite has become theFrench negative indefinite (the same is true of _personne_).This morphosyntactic process is obviously relevant to thehistory of these items in Romance, but it receives noattention here because it is a matter of morphologicalcontinuity, not of syntax.

Related to this is the labelling of the Old Spanishconstruction with _todo_ as a 'reflex' of Latin _omnia res_by Batllori and Roca (p250). For me, at least, a reflex isa formal descendant. Here it is the semanticallycorresponding structure.

There are occasional reminders that dependence on a singleparadigm can limit one's insights. For example, Delsingfinds &quot;the division of objects into these two types of nounphrases... surprising&quot; (p262). Since one of his two typesconsists almost entirely of pronouns, I was surprised by hissurprise.

The book is beautifully presented and has been wellcopyedited and proofread, so much so that it would bechurlish to enumerate the very few errors I found.

Malcolm Ross is a Senior Fellow in the Research School ofPacific and Asian Studies at the Australian NationalUniversity. He works on Austronesian and Papuan languages,focussing particularly on New Guinea and northwest Melanesiaand on the reconstruction of the linguistic and culturehistory of this region. He is particularly interested indiachronic morphosyntax, as well as in the effects ofcontact-induced change.